2 poems
Waldend
I first came by train from Penn Station, by rail from North Station,
by foot from Concord Station.
I stayed no night. I rented no inside. I saw the many inns said,
SLEPT HERE (why not “woke”?).
And, treating the gone-cabin as destination, noticed the different
nouns for what had stood there:
Hut
Cabin
Site
how I had to go thru the word “water” to get to the water,
never to be a body alone in open time,
thinking
myself
“free,”
only to find I am “still in words....”
from The Intrabody
This self,
of which one is
to take care, and which is
“subject to
dispersal,”
this stranger, you know
me to be, breaths on both sides
of the difference: this wall,
which everything is in defense
of its continuing....
This bare life, which is
not from itself,
which came here
and changed,
which crawled, and was
stood among
introductions....
This animal, we are
being human in—
“that we exist at all
is our Nakedness.”
Notes: “Waldend” is dedicated to the philosopher Stanley Cavell, who writes: “Walden was always gone, from the beginning of the words of Walden.” And, “The Intrabody” is in dialogue with the work of Emanuele Coccia, and integrates insights by such thinkers as Giorgio Agamben, Lyn Hejinian, Fred Moten, and Alice Notley.
Christina Davis is the author of An Ethic (Nightboat, 2013), Forth A Raven (Alice James, 2006), and the forthcoming chapbook Neighborn (2022). Her poems, essays, and translations have appeared in such journals as American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Brooklyn Rail, Jubilat, New Republic and Poetry. She currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she serves as the curator of the Woodberry Poetry Room, Harvard University.